Except NZ's gun laws were already stricter than Australias. To get an AR15 here, buyers must have a standard, current firearms licence and an approved police order form. If the clip has a higher capacity than 7 rounds, you need a special endorsement. Also, you must have proper storage for firearms which the police will inspect before granting a licence.

Oh, and you will have difficulty being deemed 'fit and proper' to possess or use firearms if you have:

a history of violence
repeated involvement with drugs
been irresponsible with alcohol
a personal or social relationship with people deemed to be unsuitable to be given access to firearms
indicated an intent to use a firearm for self-defence.

That's a direct quote from the police licence page

@harlequinn, you do realise that NZ actually has quite sensible gun laws? You can own semi-auto rifles and so on but to do so you need a firearms licence. This includes not only a police check, but the cops will actually come to your house and check that you have adequate storage provisions for your guns. On top of that

You will have difficulty being deemed 'fit and proper' to possess or use firearms if you have:

- a history of violence
- repeated involvement with drugs
- been irresponsible with alcohol
- a personal or social relationship with people deemed to be unsuitable to be given access to firearms
- indicated an intent to use a firearm for self-defence.

To me those are perfectly reasonable and sensible restrictions.

@scheherazade, ah yes, the libertarian argument. I want a gun and fuck everyone else.

Kids getting shot at school? Fuck 'em, not my problem.
Random nutjob mows down a bunch of people in California? Fuck 'em, not my problem.

The fact is that guns do cause harm. The "people kill people" argument is beyond infantile. Of course, people kill people.... with a gun. It's a lot harder to go on a mass killing spree armed with a stick.

Here are the indisputable facts:
- There are some sick people out there. Some are just fucked up, some are in need of help.
- Sometimes these people snap.
- Sometimes when they do, they get a gun and kill a bunch of other people.
- If they didn't have a gun, the harm would be less.
I'm assuming no-one disputes those facts.

Now there are two solutions to this:
- Pro-gun advocates take the position that citizens need guns to defend themselves from this kind of situation. They often argue that instead of taking guns away from everyone, we should focus on either helping the mentally unbalanced or stopping them by shooting them.
- Gun control advocates take the position that if the shooter didn't have access to a gun in the first place, then maybe the whole mess would be avoided or at the very least minimised.

To me, it's a simple matter of practicalities. Option 1 is simply not working. We're decades (possibly centuries) away from completely understanding mental illness, that's if we achieve that at all. Meanwhile, crazy/insane/evil people are still going on shooting rampages.
And stopping them after the fact? That's pretty cold comfort to the people that have already been killed.

I am genuinely perplexed as to how people don't understand this.
Gun control works. In every other developed country in the world, there are reasonable and sensible laws restricting firearm ownership, and there is nothing like the kind of insane shootings we see on a regular basis in the US.

No-one is arguing that all guns should be taken away. No-one is saying you can't hunt or target shoot or even defend your home if necessary (although again, in the civilised world, most of us have no need for that).

But jesus, maybe you don't need an AR-15 with a massive clip. And is it that unreasonable to check to see if someone is mental or criminal before selling them a gun?

Apparently, in the US, it is.

Lions definitely hunt in packs, but lions are the exception to the rule that cats are not pack animals, i.e., maintain strong, complex social relationships. Asking which of cats and dogs is smarter depends a lot on what one means by "smarter". There is no question that dogs have a higher social intelligence. Cats are probably smarter in terms of visual discrimination tasks (mostly speculation on my part based on knowledge of cat and dog visual systems).

But if by smarter one means ability to learn, I don't think there is any question that dogs come out ahead. The socially driven desire to please alpha might make them more willing to learn, but it doesn't improve their ability to do so. I'm not aware of any research in which cats are shown to be capable of learning novel complex tasks - ones involving behaviors they haven't naturally evolved and require more "thought" than simple behavioral responses.

The important thing to look at is median household income, divided by income quintile.


Obviously it's good that incomes are up across the board, but "rich" and "poor" aren't always, or even usually, used as absolute terms. Usually they're used as relative terms, and certainly relative wealth can have a profound effect on life satisfaction and social relationships. As such, it's perfectly possible to think of the "poor getting poorer" if their relative income isn't growing as fast as others' incomes.

Certainly it's a better situation than if their incomes were going down in absolute terms, but the gap in income can still have social consequences.

In terms of economics and happiness, I think we can show that the marginal happiness benefit of a dollar decreases with overall wealth. As such, we get higher happiness through progressive taxation, and surely that's got some value in terms of a societal target. Obviously there are other forces that come into play (and capitalism in general is the best system we've found), but I think income inequality is at least something valid to be concerned about.

But I suppose that marks me as an idiot to Shaka, and I look forward to another downvote from peroxide (though I don't have any idea what he disagrees with me on).

>> ^smooman:

>> ^rychan:
<em>>> <It just seems like a useless exercise to me to try to give people the freedom to use a drug like heroin when it will only cause terrible repercussions.

insert alcohol for heroin in that statement and you get the mindset that gave us prohibition. go the fuck away


I don't think "go the fuck away" is an attitude that's welcome on the sift.

As far as your statement about prohibition, yes, you're right. My attitude is the same that prompted alcohol prohibition, which clear didn't work out. But that doesn't mean that all types of prohibition are folly. We have assault weapon prohibitions, as well, which inhibit your personal freedom to buy a bazooka.

Also, I'd say that alcohol is used responsibly* about 95% of the the time, and heroin about 5% of the time. Unfortunately, alcohol, by virtue of being legal and relatively inexpensive, is used vastly more than heroin so that 5% of irresponsible alcohol use is extremely damaging.

*responsible usage means that your safety and the safety of those around you, your financial well-being, and your social relationships are not negatively influenced.

Prohibition has all sorts of nasty side-effects, as BansheeX points out. We could try to be stricter, like Singapore or China, and that seems to make the drug prohibition much more effective. Or we could decriminalize consumption of drugs, but still require mandatory treatment, like Portugal. Regardless, no country seems to have found the silver bullet to deal with hard drugs.

I think these drugs are well-engineered human poisons, which damage your brain, sometimes permanently, and damage a society enormously. Others disagree, or say that even if this is the case, it should be legal.

What if there were a drug specifically engineered to send a user into a murderous rampage? They might not actually go on a killing spree every time they use it, but it is a common and expected side effect. Should it still be legal to use such a drug?

>> ^quantumushroom:
If you don't execute them now you'll be reading/hearing about them in a few years' time, and not for receiving Grammys.
Let Africa Sink.
http://www.theothersideofkim.com/index.php/essays/36/


This article is nonsense.

It suggests that colonialism was beneficial and once that ended in the '60s, everything went to shit. Well no duh, it's not exactly a revelation that revolutions tend to lead to populist, despotic, autocratic dictators that steal from their people. It's a trend that happened all over the world and was not helped by the Cold War wranglings thereafter where these same dictators were propped up to serve the interests of their beneficiaries.

It makes the argument that charity and foreign aid is the only way to stimulate development. It's not, in fact unless it's in response to something unexpected such as emergency disaster relief, it's for the most part only beneficial in the short run and at worst counter productive, showing time and time again to create dependence. What has seen many African countries prosper is the opening of trade barriers, the promotion of foreign direct investment over portfolio investment which gives corporations a stake in their target country, and the promotion of democratic governments and impartial judiciaries.

Tribal warfare on the level that you no longer see in other continents of the world is a product of the lack of urbanisation and agglomeration of split social groups. The US is coming up against the same problem in Afghanistan for that matter. You can't come into Africa, try to force democracy on it cold turkey and expect it to work. Mutually trustworthy social relationships between disparate tribes don't appear overnight, although they are needed for an effective representative democracy and for a thriving business sector that brings together entrepreneurs and those with capital and funds to actualise those ideas. They are also needed dealing with natural distasters, diseases and creating safe habitable environments.